National Relations: Public Diplomacy, National Identity and the Swedish Institute 1945-1970

By Nikolas Glover

In Stockholm in January of 1945, an assembly of Swedish diplomats and businessmen initiated an organization that was to improve the country's reputation abroad. The new, semi-governmental Swedish Institute was charged with explaining Sweden's policy of neutrality during the war, with encouraging peace-building, and with promoting foreign trade in the new international world order. Original and insightful, this account analyzes the policies, funding, and national narratives of the Swedish Institute. Providing a historical perspective on the politics of Swedish propaganda and explaining how ideas of communication shaped the Institute's work and its representations of Sweden, this record also offers a comparative perspective on American national identity and its inherent notions of national exceptionalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9789187121241

Nikolas Glover

Nikolas Glover is a lecturer of history and the history of popular culture at Stockholm University and the coeditor of a Swedish anthology on historical approaches to popular music.

Book preview

e9789187121241_cover.jpge9789187121241_i0001.jpg

This book is published with generous support from

the Department of History, Stockholm University,

Josef och Gunvor Anérs Stiftelse, and

Signhild Engkvists Stiftelse.

Nordic Academic Press

P.O. Box 1206

S-221 05 Lund, Sweden

[e-mail]

www.nordicacademicpress.com

© Nordic Academic Press and Nikolas Glover 2011

Typesetting: Frederic Täckström, www.sbmolle.com

Cover: Maria Jörgel Andersson

Cover image: Taken from the Swedish Institute’s booklet Love in Sweden.

© Bertil Torekull & Lennart Frantzén, 1970.

Print: ScandBook, Falun, Sweden 2011

ISBN: 978-91-87121-24-1

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

CHAPTER 1 - The Swedish Institute and inter-nationalism

CHAPTER 2 - Forerunners and frames 1945

CHAPTER 3 - Survival in an age of enlightenment 1945−1953

CHAPTER 4 - Stabilised support, imagining the image 1954−1962

CHAPTER 5 - The politics of change 1961−1962

CHAPTER 6 - Professionalised structures, fragmenting visions 1963−1970

CHAPTER 7 - Chronologies in context

CHAPTER 8 - National relations in world society

Summary

Appendix - Selected productions

Notes

References

Acknowledgements

About the author

CHAPTER 1

The Swedish Institute and inter-nationalism

This study considers the history of the first twenty-five years of the Swedish Institute for Cultural Exchange with Foreign Countries, a semi-official organisation established in 1945. The Swedish Institute was funded partly by the state and partly by the private contributions of its corporate members, and its stated mission was to promote Sweden’s political, economic and cultural relations with other countries. As such it was a key organisation in post-war Swedish public diplomacy.¹

However, examining the Swedish Institute as an organisation is a means to an end in this study. It is the probing of notions of national uniqueness that the history of the Swedish Institute will serve to facilitate. More particularly it explores such notions of uniqueness in an era and a part of the world in which discourses of international interdependence and self-consciously anti-nationalistic identities came to be all the more dominant. This I contend is an important challenge for students of the ongoing evolution of nationalisms and national identities. It focuses attention on the state-sanctioned, mainstream nationalism of public diplomacy and cultural relations, rather than on the extremist ideologies expressed by marginalised xenophobic groups and isolationist right-wing parties. It is the former kind of nationalism that points towards the hegemonic constructions of the nation among the mobile elites of the post-war world – not its ostracised, pathological other.

The primary purpose of this study is therefore to analyse how the Swedish Institute related Sweden to the world, in both senses of the verb relate – ‘narrate’ and ‘connect.’ It is in this dual sense that ‘national relations’ is introduced and employed as an analytical concept. It refers on the one hand to the domestic interests and historical circumstances shaping relations (narratives) of the nation’s uniqueness. At the same time it refers to the broader international relations (connections) which made such national narratives relevant and legitimate in relation to other nations. The characteristics of the post-war world – its influential transnational discourses and the institutionalised international order – dictate that the twentieth-century history of things national must be approached as one of both narratives and connections. The idea of the nation may be old, but in important respects it has been adapted along the way. Thus, to study national identities is to study both historical change and continuity.

A necessary yet indefinable invention

Finally, based on what has been said here about the Institute, I would like to paraphrase Voltaire’s comment about God by saying that if the Institute did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.²

According to Consul-General Olof Lamm in 1947, the invention of an institute for the promotion abroad of Swedish culture was a historical necessity. From today’s horizon, this may to an extent seem like an obvious statement. Organisations corresponding to the Swedish Institute had been or would be established in one country after the other.³ Alliance Française was a pre-twentieth-century phenomenon, established as it was in 1883, but its first official French programme of cultural diplomacy was launched in 1923. Deutsche Akademie was formed in 1925 (replaced in 1951 by Das Goethe-Institut), the British Council in 1934, and the Danish Det Danske Selskab in 1940. Pro Helvetia in Switzerland and the Norwegian Kontoret for Kulturelt Samkvem med Utlandet were founded in 1949, and the United States Information Agency (USIA) was formed in 1953 – even if its institutional roots dated back to the end of the Second World War at least. For totalitarian regimes too, cultural promotion had become an increasingly important part of foreign policy: in 1925 the Soviet Union established the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and in 1926 Italy opened its first Italian Cultural Institute overseas.⁴ In this light, the Swedish Institute might well seem a more or less inevitable national example of a general international trend.

As with any historical development, however, there was nothing inevitable about the institutionalisation of state-sponsored international communication in the post-war world. If anything, the Second World War had proved the most destructive consequences of propaganda and nationalism, as well as the futility of notions of a peaceful international community based on intercultural understanding. Despite this, both nationalism and internationalism, both propaganda and universal enlightenment, were reinvented in the immediate post-war years, most of the time not as contradictory forces but rather as mutually dependent ones.⁵a How this came about in different national contexts, and why, are questions that still remain to be explored.

The Swedish articulations of this complicated set of ideas and practices are the focus of this study; inflections and reflections as they were of local history as well as of the structural qualities of the post-war nation-state system. For the fiscal year 1944−45, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs allocated 529,000 to Upplysningsverksamhet i utlandet angående Sverige (‘Enlightenment activities abroad regarding Sweden’).⁵b This minor budget item was taken up under the catch-all section ‘Miscellaneous’. A major part of the sum went to a new, joint public – private, non-profit association, the Swedish Institute for Cultural Exchange with Foreign Countries, formally established in January 1945. Twenty-five years later the Swedish Institute was transformed into a wholly state-funded foundation. By then this once minor budget item had expanded into one of four major sections of the Ministry’s total budget. In the fiscal year of In the fiscal year of 1970 – 71, SEK 12,600,000 were allocated to Informationsverksamhet om Sverige i utlandet (‘Information activities abroad about Sweden’) – around half the sum going to the Swedish Institute. It is clear then that this was a policy area that was ascribed markedly increased importance in the post-war decades – in Sweden as elsewhere.

During this period of considerable expansion, for its first twenty-five years until the reorganisation of 1970, the Institute was financially dependent on public funds as well as corporate support. Its highest executive body was a council of one hundred members that was composed in such a way as to represent all sectors of Sweden’s society. But what was the Swedish Institute supposed to do? For an organisation considered a historical necessity, its exact mission was difficult to pinpoint to say the least.

In the historian Nicholas Cull’s terms, the Institute was closely involved in four out of five core components of what in the US by the 1960s would be termed public diplomacy – defined by Cull as ‘an international actor’s attempt to conduct its foreign policy by engaging with foreign publics.’ These components were listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy and exchange diplomacy. The fifth, international broadcasting, was never undertaken by the Swedish Institute.⁶ The Institute oversaw the production and distribution of books, pamphlets, films and touring exhibitions about Sweden and things Swedish (listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy), organised study visits for foreign visitors, and administered international exchange programmes (exchange diplomacy). Furthermore it oversaw the appointment of Swedish lecturers at a number of universities abroad (cultural diplomacy), functioned for a while as an administrative home of the first Swedish international development programmes, and worked in close cooperation with the General Export Association, the Tourist Traffic Association and various other organised interest groups (advocacy, cultural diplomacy).

In 1969 its director, Per-Axel Hildeman, when speaking to the council, looked back on previous speeches at the Institute’s AGMs:

Over the years the Institute has acquired a series of animals to symbolise its work. We have created a Zodiac of the Institute … It started with the earthworm, introduced by today’s jubilee speaker Tore Tallroth in 1961. All sorts of crawling, flying and running creepy-crawlies have since joined the Zodiac, each in its own way illustrating something of the indefinable character of the Swedish Institute.⁷

Hildeman was referring to how, in their annual speeches to the council, he and his predecessor Tore Tallroth had applied a series of metaphors to capture the essence of the disparate work of the Swedish Institute. Among those metaphors were the earthworm (whose invisible and indispensable work makes the soil fertile for others); the cuckoo (laying its Swedish eggs in other birds’ nests); the corncrake (inconspicuously and restlessly ‘singing out its message with the perseverance of a PR man’); and the stag beetle (that can carry 150 times its own weight).⁸ This repeated use of metaphor underscores what Hildeman referred to as the indefinable character of the core of the Institute’s work.

It is the combination of apparent indefinability and reiterated necessity which indicates that the Institute is worthy of closer historical examination.⁹ The combination suggests how the Swedish Institute provided a forum for power struggles; struggles over economic funds, over the meaning of central social concepts, and ultimately over identifications of Sweden and Swedishness. Because of the Institute’s semi-official status, these struggles reflected and reproduced processes in Swedish society at large. Moreover, because of its international field of operation, the goings-on at the Institute were also the outcome of impulses from abroad. In this sense, the Swedish Institute was relating Sweden both outward and inward – its representations of the nation directed at once to foreign and domestic publics. This is a dimension to national identity formation which the concept of national relations is intended to capture, and thus a theoretical point that will be developed in this study.

It is therefore the Swedish Institute as a site of political, social and cultural cross-currents which will be analysed in the following – not the Institute’s complete organisational history. This will be done by tracing three particular, interlinked dimensions of the Institute’s history; the actors and interests involved, the ideas and rhetoric used, and the representations and narratives consequently produced. As will be discussed at length, all three dimensions illustrate the slippery indefinability – and yet apparent necessity – of the field in which the Swedish Institute was working.

Pursuing these dimensions, this analysis of the Swedish Institute’s national relations will engage with research on the history of public diplomacy, the history of ideas about communication, and the historiography of nationalism and national identities. In the following I shall outline these fields in turn, in each case locating where the present study seeks to fit in. I make no claim to exhaustive presentations of existing research. It is the cross-fertilisation of perspectives and research questions that emerges by discussing the three fields in relation to one another that is the point of the following overview.

Perspectives on public diplomacy

Much scholarship has been produced on public and cultural diplomacy and on the associated fields of psychological warfare and propaganda studies. It will suffice here to delineate two main directions within this field. One oriented towards the institutions, actors and events of traditional high politics, the second more concerned with cultural history.

With regard to institutional histories of public diplomacy, Philip M. Taylor’s study of the British Council and Nicholas Cull’s and Wilson P. Dizard Jr.’s corresponding work on the USIA approach their subjects from a primarily political point of view.¹⁰ The main focus of this body of work is to fill important gaps in the history of British and American foreign policy. For instance, noting the omission of the USIA in most accounts of American diplomacy, Cull explains that the organisation ‘played a key part in the great events of the era’ of the Cold War.¹¹ Likewise, writing as a pioneer on the topic in 1981, Taylor argued that because existing research had tended to concentrate upon the more blatant examples of state propaganda, either in the hands of the totalitarian regimes or its use in time of war, ‘this concentration has tended to reinforce the general, if inaccurate, impression that Britain did not conduct such an unpleasant activity in peacetime and that it was simply one of the necessary evils of war.’¹² What these thoroughly researched historical studies of the USIA and the British Council serve to do, then, is to expand the breadth and depth of diplomatic history, and consequently what is included in the academic field of foreign policy studies. In accordance with much political history, these studies focus on the historical actors involved – the people and institutions, the policies they chose to pursue, and the political ideologies that guided them. These scholars are however not primarily concerned with engaging critically with the form and content of the national narratives which the institutions produced.

Dealing with the same historical institutions and with similar sources as Cull and Dizard, other scholars represent an alternative approach to the history of public diplomacy. For instance, Frank Ninkovich’s The diplomacy of ideas (contemporaneous with Taylor’s study) and Laura A. Belmonte’s more recent Selling the American way explicitly use the USIA and its institutional predecessors as a prism to analyse broader cultural phenomena. The study of cultural diplomacy, writes Ninkovich, can serve as ‘a peephole affording at least a partial glimpse of broader vistas of cultural processes’, and ‘explore particular visions of those dynamics.’¹³ Ninkovich himself does so by interpreting the politics of US cultural relations programmes during the first half of the twentieth century in light of three definitions of ideology, thus allowing him to analyse the American policy shift in cultural diplomacy between 1938 and 1950 as an articulation of broader political and cultural developments of the era.

Likewise, Belmonte sees the study of the USIA’s production of national self-representations in a broader light, as ‘a way to assess the state’s construction of national identity as a means of defining and protecting national security’.¹⁴ ‘Most interested’, as she is, ‘in the ways propaganda texts represent the U.S. government’s efforts to explain American national identity to itself and others’,¹⁵ Belmonte suggests a further potential in historical sources of this type: not only can they be seen to reflect a political culture, but they can be seen as an example of how national identities are constructed.¹⁶

Thus, in Ninkovich’s and Belmonte’s work, the institutions of public diplomacy themselves are downplayed in favour of the national ideological and societal contexts which they have been shaped by – and themselves contributed to shape. They thereby underscore the conclusion drawn by one scholar who, surveying recent Cold War scholarship, declared that ‘Western governments were prepared to spend considerable amounts of money, time, and energy creating and shaping the cultural landscape that acted as a backdrop to their diplomatic and military actions at home and overseas.’¹⁷

This broader cultural approach, to which this present study also adheres, in turn leads into another field of burgeoning historical research mostly separated from the field of public diplomacy: that of nationalism and national identity formation. I shall be returning to that shortly. First, however, I would like to address another historical aspect of the emergence of public diplomacy: ideas of communication. For if, as has been emphasised above, the institutionalisation of public diplomacy evolved in recursive fashion to its surrounding society then the social history of communication is a crucial component in this historic process.

Historicising communication

There has been a tendency in historical studies of public diplomacy to concentrate on its relation to the traditional realm of politics proper – political institutions, ideologies and actors. The simultaneous twentieth-century development of communications professions, the history of the discourse of information, and the social and technological trajectories inherent more generally in the emergence of what has been called promotional culture, have not been taken into account to the same extent.¹⁸

As I believe that these historic processes were as crucial in the evolution of the public aspect of public diplomacy as the political ideologies and the international system were to the diplomacy part, the present study seeks to emphasise this side of the Institute’s work. This, I shall argue, is a key to understanding how the nation and its surroundings have been imagined, as well as the discourses shaping the practices of public diplomacy. The history of national relations is entwined with the social history of communication.

The ambition therefore is to explore the historical development of discourses of information and public image not only as expressions of public diplomacy, but also as factors underlying its development. As the sociologist John B. Thompson has put it in his critique of much traditional social theory, we must put aside the intuitively plausible idea that communication media serve to transmit information and symbolic content to individuals whose relations to others remain fundamentally unchanged. Instead, writes Thompson, we must see ‘that the use of communication media involves the creation of new forms of action and interaction in the social world, new kinds of social relationship and new ways of relating to others and to oneself.’¹⁹ In the case of the Swedish Institute, this is particularly pertinent to how Sweden could be constructed. The nation was literally related to a foreign ‘them’ and a national ‘us’ in ways dependent on the means at hand (such as different communication media) – and the discourses associated with those means.

The development of the Swedish Institute will thus here be understood against the background of broader technological and intellectual developments associated with communication, a concept which communications scholar John Durham Peters argues is one of the characteristic concepts of the twentieth century. ²⁰ Peters argues that even though communication today might seem a fixed problem for the human species, it was only towards the late nineteenth century that it acquired its ‘grandeur and pathos’:

technologies such as the telegraph and the radio refitted the old term ‘communication’, once used for any kind of physical transfer or transmission, into a new kind of quasi-physical connection across the obstacles of time and space. Thanks to electricity, communication could now take place regardless of impediments such as distance or embodiment. The term conjured up a long tradition of dreams about angelic messengers and communion between separated lovers. ‘Communication’ seemed far superior to the age-old grubby face-to-face work of making lives together with language. It was swift as lightening, subtle as ether, and wordless as thoughts of love.²¹

Thus new technologies introduced high hopes as well as deep disappointments; new world-views based variously on potential promise or looming threat.²² These not only applied to societies of people but equally to the world of states, most obviously so in relation to the total wars casting their morbid shadow over the twentieth century. Consequently, Peters argues that communication was an especially hot topic of intellectual debate in Europe and the US at two points – after the First World War and after the Second World War – and it was also during this period that institutions for the promotion of international cultural relations were established in a series of countries; among them Sweden.

If one ambition then is to insert the history of communication into historical studies of public diplomacy, another is to contribute a historical case study to contemporary discourses on ‘the information society’.²³ ‘What is information? Or more precisely, what are information?’ asks communications scholar Neil Postman: ‘What re-definitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require?’²⁴ Discussing the state of current research in the US, Ronald E. Day argues that analyses of information and society and culture have almost totally been given over to ‘so-called information specialists and public policy planners’, mainly from computer science, business and business schools, the government and the quantitative social sciences, one result being ‘a dependence on naïve historiographical forms for analysing the phenomenon of information.’²⁵ The social scientist Hanna Kjellgren makes a similar point about the state of research on public information programmes in Sweden and official Swedish information polices.²⁶

By tracing the various conceptions and practices of information and communication in the Swedish Institute’s work, and the different professional groups involved in shaping them, the intention of the present study is thus to problematise the otherwise dominant technical and prescriptive uses of such concepts. Rather than seeing communication and information as given, ahistorical mechanisms, they will in this study be approached as concepts articulating changing historical discourses. If communication in this way is not seen as something normatively good, and information is not instinctively understood as a genie in a bottle which ‘wants to be free’, then the way they have historically been constructed and contested opens up for a discussion of strategies of power and control in an era that saw the commodification of information and the professionalisation of communication.

More specifically, in the context of public diplomacy, these contestations can serve to trace changes in the mediation and formation of dominant national identities. If the nation was no longer to be chauvinistically imposed on others but instead benignly related, what did it become along the way? And on whose terms did this re-imagination of the nation take place? It is this dimension to the cultural history of nationalism and national identities that the concept of national relations draws attention to. This leads us to a third field of research.

Inter-national identities

It is an often cited truism that nations are what Benedict Anderson calls imagined communities, and as such are social constructions.²⁷ It must be emphasised, however, that this does not mean that nations are not real. As with all other social institutions, nations are what sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann call externalised products of human activity which have attained the character of objectivity through the process of objectivation: ‘the institutional world is objectivated human activity, and so is every single institution.’²⁸ This means, in short, that although nations might not have a tangible existence in the material world, they will not simply go away just because their constructedness has in some way been exposed. What the emphasis on construction and imagination however does imply is that there is no independent national essence ‘out there’, no reified objective thing that is the nation, beyond the historically specific institutions and practices in which the nation has been represented.

Nations then, are real – but discursively so. As such their continued existence depends on the ways in which they are produced and reproduced, presented and represented. And as Benedict Anderson writes, ‘as with modern persons, so it is with nations’: they both have a ‘need for a narrative of identity.’²⁹ For through narrative, he explains, the frustrating paradox of the national/individual ‘self ’s’ continuity through time on the one hand, and its incapacity to remember that experience of continuity on the other, can be resolved. In this context, the sociologist Margaret Somers’s concept of narrative identity is fitting. Somers argues that social identities are constituted through narrativity, that social action is guided by narrativity, and that social processes and interactions – both institutional and interpersonal – are narratively mediated.³⁰

By adding Somers’ narrative dimension to the idea of the objectivation of the nation, the permanence of the nation as an institution – rather than, as one might be tempted to think, its instability – is in fact more understandable. The concept of narrative identity, writes Somers, ‘provides a way of understanding the recursive presence of particular identities.’³¹ Similarly, the historian Martin Wiklund explains that putting an emphasis on the social roles of narratives should not be equated with the study of a subjective free-for-all, where everybody is simply entitled to their own opinion on reality. For such blatant relativism, he argues, misses the point that socially meaningful narratives make much more far-reaching claims than so. They have to make claims about what should be seen as a preferable historical orientation for society as a whole – not only about an individual person’s or group’s past, present and future.³² Thus national narratives must be formulated as relevant and reasonable for the whole of society – even if they are not necessarily accepted by all of its members. This purported inclusiveness means that even though dominant narratives may indeed be disputed and cause conflicts, there is in their very nature an inbuilt inertness when it comes to how and why they evolve over time.³³

When it comes to the formation of specifically Swedish national identities a great deal has been written, much of the scholarship being produced as a consequence of Sweden’s economic crisis in the early 1990s, its subsequent joining of the European Union, and the effects which these developments had on national narratives of a Swedish sonderweg.³⁴ The editor of one example of this work, the anthology The Swedish success story?, explains that the contributions to the volume were written in 1999 when ‘the Swedes were experiencing a rude awakening. Doubt had set in over the modern project. It was feared that the centuries-old growth of prosperity was over.’³⁵

In this body of work, in accordance with traditional national historiography, the formation of dominant Swedish national identities has largely been sought within a history delineated by the boundaries of the nation-state.³⁶ It is precisely this fact which most obviously suggests the need for further research in the field. In a critical review of recent studies of Swedishness, Thomas Steinfeld finds the same flaw in all of them, namely that the authors are attempting to ‘describe an identity from within’. Identity is a relative concept, writes Steinfeld, and ‘something outside it, a comparative perspective, is needed to determine that something resembles itself.’ Unless this is applied, ‘all internal questions concerning identity remain unanswered, insufficient, insecure, threatened – identity has no other form than that of the question posed to it.’³⁷

Steinfeld’s point is supported by other work on nationalism. The social scientist Patrik Hall crucially argues that an important empirical conclusion to be drawn from his research is ‘that nationalism as a discourse is constructed more in an international present (that is, influenced by contemporary intellectual diffusion) than through a national intellectual tradition.’ Indeed, ‘the national tradition is rather a product of the very discourse itself.’³⁸ In a similar vein, an essential argument – although it appears to be an often overlooked one – in Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined communities, is how a nationalist world-view was pioneered in the European colonies in the New World, and thereafter imported to, and adapted in, Europe and elsewhere.³⁹ After its emergence in the Americas, writes Anderson, ‘the nation proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure patent. It became available for pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands.’⁴⁰

What both Hall’s and Anderson’s arguments therefore suggest is a crucial addition to national self-perceptions, namely that the form and content of national identities are constituted equally by the narratives produced by others as by dominant narratives within the imagined community itself. If, as Hall writes, ‘nationalism has no independent existence outside of the social relations through which it is constructed’, then international social relations – not only domestic ones – must surely also be taken into account.⁴¹ This point has been elaborated on convincingly by the sociologist Michael Billig: ‘Just as a dialectic of remembering and forgetting might be said to sustain national identity’, he argues, ‘so this identity involves a dialectic of inwardness and outwardness. The nation is always a nation in a world of nations.’⁴² Nationalists live in an international world, argues Billig, and their ideology is itself an international ideology. ‘Without constant observation of the world of other nations, nationalists would be unable to claim that their nations meet the universal codes of nationhood. Nor would they have ready access to stereotyped judgments about foreigners.’⁴³

Billig’s argument is that the universality of nationhood is constantly being reaffirmed by the system of nation-states .⁴⁴ This process of mutual constitution, of endless reflection, is the focus of Kazimierz Musiał’s history of the concept of the Scandinavian Model. Musiał transcends the simple regurgitation of the history of foreign images of Sweden – which in its popular incarnation so often ends up ridiculing Sweden’s critics (such as the British correspondent Roland Huntford’s Orwellian dystopia The new totalitarians, 1971), and praising its admirers (such as the American journalist Marquis Childs’s enthusiastic intervention in US politics, Sweden: the middle way, 1936).

Instead, Musiał’s employment of the concepts ‘autostereotype’ and ‘xenostereotype’ to analyse the historical emergence of the discursive concept of the Scandinavian model has filled an important empirical and theoretical gap in research on Swedish (and Scandinavian) national identities.⁴⁵ In his analysis it is not only ‘their’ image of ‘us’, or the construction of ‘us’ through the construction of ‘them’, which is the focus of attention, but also how their images actually shape our images of ourselves. In this way, Swedish generalisations about Sweden (autostereotypes) and foreign generalisations about Sweden (xenostereotypes) are seen as mutually constitutive in Musiał’s study.

Construction of the Swedish national identity in the twentieth century took place thanks to a constant interaction between xeno- and autostereotypes. While today it may seem obvious that ‘Swedes know what … others find especially Swedish and this is incorporated in the construction of Swedish understanding of their singularity’, there are grounds for assuming that ‘others’ were originally strongly inspired by very distinctive images of Sweden produced by Swedes themselves.⁴⁶

Musiał’s study enables him to argue that after the Second World War, the international interest and attention that was directed at Sweden ‘snowballed and produced a kind of national hubris built upon a myth of economic and political superiority.’ The notion of Swedish progressiveness which consequently developed in the Western world was, in turn, ‘driven by a sociological and politological functionalism of American origin.’⁴⁷

What Musiał’s, Billig’s, and Hall’s arguments combine to underscore is the international relational context within which identities are constituted.⁴⁸ Despite the extensive amount of high-quality research on Swedish post-war identities, this is an aspect which I argue has not been explored enough.

Therefore, along with adding a Swedish cultural history to the literature on public diplomacy, and as well as developing the historical links between diplomacy and the ideas and practices of communication, I consider the international perspective on Swedish national identity-formation a third contribution to existing historical research. These contributions follow from the employment of the study’s main analytic tool; the concept of national relations.

The shape of things to come

The primary purpose of what follows is thus to analyse how the Swedish Institute related Sweden to the world. During the twenty-five years following the Second World War, the Institute worked at once on behalf of the Swedish government – particularly through the Press Department at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs – and on the behalf of prominent actors in Swedish finance and industry. For this reason the organisation and the period in question provide a particularly appropriate focus for studying national relations. Between 1945 and 1970, the semi-official Swedish Institute was central to Swedish public diplomacy. Its very existence necessitated debates about communication, and it produced narratives of Sweden that had to be accepted by its array of financial backers. Since I contend that the analytical concept of national relations is a key to understanding national identities and nationalism in the post-war era, the Swedish Institute therefore provides a most warranted case study.

Having outlined the three themes which will be brought together, it should be apparent that the study will not be chronicling all the activities and events of the Swedish Institute’s first twenty-five years. Rather, what will concern me are three principal dimensions; the actors and interests involved (public diplomacy), the ideas and rhetoric used (communication) , and the representations and narratives